Operators of certain digital control systems for some power generation equipment or processes may receive warnings when such equipment or processes are out of expected operational ranges. Such equipment may include machinery in power plants, oil refineries, pipeline pumping stations, manufacturing facilities, and many other appropriate applications. These notifications commonly take the form of “alarms” that are announced to the operators through means such as horns, indicator lights, and alarm lists on human-machine interfaces (HMIs). In some conventional digital control systems, there is a particular class of alarms called “analog process alarms.” Analog alarms can be configured on any analog process variable and can generate alarm states for a number of conditions. For any given analog alarm, there can be numerous enables, set-point values, time delay values, and alarm flag variables.
Configuring a number of analog alarms in certain conventional systems may be time consuming, because each analog alarm can be configured in the corresponding analog process variable. Moreover, configuring analog alarms in such a manner may result in a lack of consistency and uniformity between analog alarms.
In certain conventional systems, function blocks in the controller runtime can be used to generate analog alarms. However, this can introduce a layer between the process variable and its analog alarm configurations, which makes maintenance and changes to the system relatively more difficult.
Additionally, in some cases, naming conventions in the control system and at the customer facility may differ. For example, the primary name for an “exceeds high limit” variable in the control system may be “00AI1000.H” while the customer name for the variable may follow, for example, the Kraftwerks Kennzeichnungs System (KKS) naming convention. In this instance, to display variables in a familiar way, operators may need to manually assign KKS names to each alarm variable resulting in a substantial effort.
Thus, the conventional systems do not provide for configuring analog process alarms in digital control systems that allow managing the configuration and documentation of an analog alarm from a single point within the control logic and to provide automation and cross-referencing of the variables associated with an alarm. Furthermore, the existing solutions do not provide for a centralized template-based naming mechanism for analog alarms in digital control systems.